NEW YORK — Whatever NBC News decides about Brian Williams’ future at the anchor desk, chances are the time he spends on talk-show couches will all but vanish.
Williams’ willingness to “slow jam” the news with Jimmy Fallon, host “Saturday Night Live” or chat regularly with David Letterman or Jon Stewart made him a celebrity as well as a newsman and arguably contributed to the trouble he’s in over embellishing some of his experiences.
Williams has appeared on Letterman’s “Late Show” 21 times, according to the website imdb.com, which tracks such appearances, and cancelled his scheduled date on the show Thursday. He’s been on Stewart’s “The Daily Show” 22 times, appeared opposite Jimmy Fallon 18 times, Conan O’Brien 17 times, Jay Leno 13 times and been on “Saturday Night Live” five times, hosting once in 2007, according to entertainment website, imdb.com said.
He’s been on shows hosted by Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyer, Stephen Colbert and Rachael Ray, too.
He’s a go-to guy for these shows because he’s good, with a rare kind of comfort and versatility, said Michael Naidis, a veteran late-night television producer who worked most recently on CBS’ “Late Late Show.”
“You can see how comfortable Williams was dealing with almost any question in almost any format and before almost any audience,” Naidis said. “If the host asked questions, he answered. If the host was weak in any way and for any reason, he jumped in with stories, although, perhaps, that’s not as wonderful now in retrospect. If the audience was important and being left out, he changed that. He was good talking seriously and good joking around.”
For many years, journalists have felt the need to appear on entertainment talk shows to prove that they’re regular folk who know how to laugh at themselves, said Jeff Greenfield, veteran CBS and CNN journalist and commentator.
“In one sense, nobody was better at that than Brian,” Greenfield said. “He has a wicked sense of humor.”
Any idea that Williams overdid it is sort of revisionist history, given what has happened over the last week, he said. “What would the evidence be? His news show is No. 1.”
There’s a certain kind of pressure being on a talk show, particularly for a newsman, as Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly explained on Kimmel’s show Monday night.
“When you come on a late-night show … you don’t want to be a dweeb,” O’Reilly said. “You want to have something interesting to say. What happens is, a journalist will say ‘I was there’ and then a story, to make it more dramatic and interesting, will emerge.”
Shortly after it happened during a reporting trip to Iraq in 2003, Williams explained on NBC that one of a group of helicopters he had been flying with had been hit by a rocket-propelled grenade. When he appeared with Letterman a decade later, the story changed to where his helicopter had been hit, which Williams now admits is false. It wasn’t until he told the same story on “Nightly News” last month and veterans who had been there complained that the embellishment emerged.
In Israel in 2006, Williams explained to his news viewers that he’d been on an Israeli helicopter and saw a trail of smoke and dust where Hezbollah rockets had landed in the Israeli countryside, and described seeing rockets being launched six miles from his location.
The story became more dramatic when he appeared on “The Daily Show” a month later.
“Here’s a view of rockets I have never seen, passing underneath us, 1,500 feet beneath us,” Williams said. “And we’ve got the gunner doors on this thing, and I’m saying to the general, some four-star, ‘It wouldn’t take much for them to adjust the aim and try to do a ring toss right through our open doors, would it?'”
(An Israeli army official who traveled with Williams that day, Jacob Dallal, on Tuesday called the anchor’s account “generally reasonable.” He said it was fair to assume rockets flew beneath their helicopter).
Williams’ future as an NBC anchor is being decided now, as the network looks into discrepancies between statements he’s made and makes a calculation about whether or not he’s too damaged to continue.
It would seem likely that efforts to rehabilitate his image will include far less face time on late-night talk shows.
“At this point, I think it would be very wise to stay away,” Greenfield said. Even though Letterman and Stewart are skilled interviewers, they run entertainment shows, and if there’s any laughter while Williams is talking about this issue, that would be very damaging, he said.
Some of the talk show hosts that Williams appeared with have already made him a butt of jokes.
“Brian Williams won a Grammy for best spoken word album in the fiction category,” O’Brien said Monday night. “At least, I think he did. That’s what he told me.”
Stewart also had fun with Williams, joking about a newsman persona getting mixed up in the celebrity world. But he also targeted news organizations taking Williams to task.
“I am happy,” he said. “Finally, someone is being held to account for misleading America about the Iraq War.”